


this slumber that creeps

by childhoodinfamy



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Death, Divergent Timelines, F/M, M/M, Minor Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-07
Updated: 2015-02-07
Packaged: 2018-03-10 20:57:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3303236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/childhoodinfamy/pseuds/childhoodinfamy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>We'll lay here for years or for hours, thrown here or found, to freeze or to thaw; or: the world splinters when Bucky falls.</p><p>(I'll be home with you. I'll be home with you.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	this slumber that creeps

**Author's Note:**

> one time, sarah made me listen to "in a week" by hozier and i died and i wrote this from beyond the grave. enjoy.
> 
> (please note: "character death" is kind of a misleading tag because timelines.)

It is the second of March, 1945 when Steve Rogers watches his best friend fall. It’s a split second, on the side of that train, with Bucky’s fingers stretching to meet Steve’s an inch out of reach. It’s a split second, and the world splinters.

-

It’s sixty-seven days from V-E Day.

Sixty-seven days from celebration in the streets, from the end of the war that’s ensnared them both for years.

Neither of them will live to see it.

-

This is how it happens: Steve with one foot still in the train, every muscle straining in the vain hope that his arm will stretch that final inch; Bucky, desperately clinging to a broken railing, legs swinging below him with no purchase to be found. Their lungs are frozen, empty, with the knowledge that this is not going to work.

-

It doesn’t.

Bucky falls.

Steve watches.

Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes falls to the ground, body torn. Presumed dead.

Two days later, Captain Steven Grant Rogers pilots a plane into the water.

Presumed dead.

-

Or:

-

Their fingers catch. Steve hauls Bucky’s body onto the train. Their bodies collapse against each other on the ground. Their breathing matches up, like it always has. Bucky’s fingers twist in the fabric of Steve’s uniform, Steve’s arms wrap tightly around Bucky’s body; they hold on far too long, shaken and shaking, and they are alive.

They live.

-

But maybe:

-

Bucky does fall. The train stops, eventually, and Steve says nothing before turning back around in the direction they’ve come.

He spends days searching for Bucky’s body.

He finds only blood.

He’s still looking when Johann Schmidt pilots a plane strapped with bombs across the globe; Peggy Carter is on that plane with him.

(She crashes-lands it, like Steve would have in her place.)

(Or. She lands safely.)

(She doesn’t. She does. She drowns. She lives.)

(She lives.)

Steve marries her a year later.

The Winter Soldier stays quiet. Bucky Barnes never sees Steve Rogers again. For that matter, he never sees Bucky Barnes again.

-

An outside possibility:

-

Bucky falls. Steve, too frozen in grief, does not look for his body. No one does. Barnes was loved, but he is no Captain America, his body can be left if it means manpower will be saved.

But when Steve dies two days later, the Howling Commandos, alongside Peggy Carter, go searching for Bucky Barnes.

It seems only right, after all, for them to be buried next to each other, even if Steve’s body isn’t really there.

Like Steve would have (could have, didn’t), they find only blood.

They follow the trail, they track him down. With everything broken as it is, they will not lose Bucky Barnes twice.

It’s in a small HYDRA base just over two weeks later that they find him, broken and huddled, eyes crazed. His dog tags have been ripped from his body along with his arm, along with his willpower, but he is still Bucky Barnes. His eyes shine when he sees them. He is quiet but for one small question, repeated over and over in a broken voice, even after he realizes there is no answer forthcoming.

(“ _Steve?_ ”)

They wait to tell him until they’ve reached safety and his arm has been saved in any way possible—which is not saying much; it cuts off just past the shoulder, now, and he tilts unevenly. He doesn’t look at it, not ever. He signs paper clumsily with his right hand, a dull look in his eyes every time, his lips limp with resignation, still curving around that one syllable of question, the only thing he’s really said since they found him.

It falls to Peggy to break the news.

Her eyes are sad when she says it, sad and soft, her lips a shaky, flat line as she says the words (“ _I’m sorry_.”), and she’s the only person who can meet Bucky’s shattered gaze after that. Because she understands.

And it’s only Peggy Carter who can face him, months after the war has ended, in his family’s Brooklyn apartment.

He has not left the brick-enclosed walls of the Barnes home since his honorable discharge. He did not show up to receive his purple heart (he doesn’t want a medal for this, it’s not anything he had control over, it’s not something to commemorate, not to him), he does not answer the letters from the other Commandos; the meager conversation he has shared with his family has been noncommittal, weak. Empty.

It is in September that Peggy Carter starts to visit him.

She doesn’t talk at first. Just sits next to him for an hour or so, silent and soft and solid. He says nothing, does not ask her to leave, quietly hopes she will not. Eventually, she reaches her hand out to enclose around his; her fingers are so much smaller than his own, paler, with painted fingernails. They are nothing like Steve’s, and yet so similar—they are gentle and kind, fingers that could perform the most delicate of tasks, but solid as they twist around Bucky’s own shaking hand.

(Bucky thinks, privately, that she is stronger than anyone he’s known.)

She breaks the silence before she leaves, to offer him a job.

He turns her down, and it is the first full sentence he can remember saying for months. “I can’t, Peggy.” He never used to call her that, but her last name feels too formal, now.

She nods. “I’ll be back tomorrow, then.”

Peggy Carter, always true to her word, is back the next day.

The fifth time she stops by, he says, before she can ask her daily question, “I already said no.”

She smirks, leaning against his family’s fridge, snagging a spare roll from the basket on the counter. Her cheek is full of food as she says, “I’m coming back every day until you say yes.”

Bucky sighs, tips his head back against the cabinets. “Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

She stays true to her word.

She is back the next day, and the next, until Bucky takes the job.

It’s not what he ever expected, but they make a great team. He likes doing something that uses his brain and not just his trigger finger.

-

Bucky Barnes dies in 2008, at the age of ninety. Steve Rogers wakes up three years later.

-

Or, Zola’s experiments slow him down. He watches Peggy’s hair grow white, her face develop lines, and he’s almost jealous.

When Steve is finally thrust back into the world, Bucky looks older than him, but not by much.

They live.

-

And then—the smallest chance.

-

Steve does not think that instant too long. He does not watch Bucky fall.

He jumps after him, no parachute, no plan, nothing. He arms himself only with the knowledge that Bucky Barnes is falling to the earth and he will not let him fall alone.

-

Neither makes it.

-

Bucky lives, Steve’s spine snaps.

-

Steve survives, Bucky bleeds out.

-

Or.

-

They fall together, they land together.

Their breaths match up, like they always have, as they lie in the snow.

Bucky’s arm has been wrenched from his body, blood spilling in a way that makes his vision dance, his mind shutting out the feeling; Steve’s spine is first a flare of pain and then numbness as Bucky shifts him, just wrong, onto his chest.

As Steve falls out of consciousness, Bucky reels, scrambling for purchase on anything other than the pain of his arm, the panic of death sneaking in on him.

So, like he’s always done, he starts to talk.

“Steve,” he starts. It’s the only word he can think to say, the only one he thinks his mouth can form in the moment. And then—“Stevie.” Steve doesn’t answer. Bucky can feel Steve’s chest rising with the breath rattling in and out of his lungs, weaker even than his worst case of pneumonia, years ago.

He focuses on those rattling breaths, weak but there, and he asks the only question he knows to ask.

-

When they were younger and Steve was sick, they’d listen to the radio shows.

Steve would cough all the way through them, so there were always snippets of the story they wouldn’t catch, but Bucky solved this problem as best he could.

He spun stories to Steve about those plot holes shot through with Steve’s sickness. Sometimes, Bucky would pay little attention to the actual plot of the show and simply fill in whatever seemed most fitting to him. After weeks of this, Bucky’s stories started to morph into their own skins. He would plan the stories all day at school, taking notes on whatever scraps of paper he could find.

Later, he would curl himself up on Steve’s bed and ask the same question every day, no matter how many times the answer stayed the same.

-

“You wanna hear a story, Stevie?”

-

And in the cold, there is, for the first time, no answer, but for the rise and fall of Steve’s chest. Bucky, trying to bite back tears, decides that’s as close to an affirmative as he’s ever going to get in their present situation, so he goes ahead.

“Perfect,” he says, voice breaking with tears. “Here goes.”

He takes a deep breath, his vision going dark for a flash of an instant, and then he opens his mouth again.

-

“It all started in an alleyway in Brooklyn, 1928.”

-

He’s not entirely sure what all he says that day. The light fades around them, and Bucky can’t tell whether it’s the day or his life that’s ending.

He keeps expecting to go numb, for his body, part by part, to start giving in. He keeps forcing air into his lungs, out in trails of words that he does not hear. He knows Steve misses all of it because even Bucky is only hearing snippets of his own voice. It’s the moments he remembers best, the ones he’d never have to rehearse, that trickle through.

-

“I apologized for weeks for that black eye. I’m still apologizin’. I’m sorry, Steve, for hittin’ you with that baseball.”

“You looked so beautiful that night, and I never was able to get that image outta my head. You smiled so small at me on that fire escape, and it was the first time you ever didn’t let me keep a sketch you did of me. I wonder where you put that one, Steve. I hope you’ve still got it.”

“Used to dream about you sometimes, Steve. All the time. Good dreams, mostly. Least, they were good from where I was sittin’. Don’t know how you never caught on.”

“Never did tell you what your mom said to me on that last night, did I? I swear, Stevie, your mom was a saint.”

-

He keeps talking until the darkness shifts back to light.

Bucky could speak for days, lifetimes about the years he’d spent with Steve, and he hasn’t even gotten to the minutiae yet, hasn’t even mentioned the way Steve had of looking at him. He could talk about that look until the sun fell from the sky.

He hasn’t even gotten to the good parts, but he can feel his body losing feeling from the toes up; he’s not sure if Steve is still breathing or if he’s just imagining it at this point, because Steve hasn’t said a word since they fell.

And he’s not sure if he’ll get another chance, so he takes a breath and skips all the parts he hasn’t told, to get to the end.

Bucky always had rushed to the resolution.

-

 “I told myself once,” he starts.

“I told myself once, when you were real sick, that if you made it through, I’d tell you.”

He feels the tears finally spilling from the corners of his eyes, falling into his hair; the air feels thin and cruel around them, like it’s been stripped of oxygen. His voice shakes around the words.

“I said I’d tell you and I never did.”

-

And so he tells him.

-

In the early day’s light, Bucky Barnes tells Steve Rogers’s unmoving body the last secret he has to tell.

He knows, then, that it can be over, now.

-

They’re found not long after that—the Commandos trudging through snow, shouting in relief when they see their commanding officer and his sergeant piled, unconscious, on top of each other.

-

Steve and Bucky are gone, already. The Commandos carry their bodies back, they’re buried next to each other.

-

Steve was gone hours ago, Bucky dies on the way back to camp.

-

They both make it to camp, where Steve recovers and Bucky dies of infection.

-

Or.  _Or._

-

The smallest sliver of a chance, a string of improbable-but-possible—

-

The Commandos find them in time, their whoops break through to Bucky, they make it to camp.

They live.

(Steve heard Bucky’s story.)

(He didn’t hear.)

(He heard.)

(Steve always hears.)

And it’s weeks before he says something, before he makes it right.

Or, he says something, but it’s the wrong thing. Bucky’s lips are tight with disappointment, Steve’s eyes clouded with confusion, with misspoken words he can’t bring himself to correct anymore, not after he’s seen Bucky’s dejected nod and broken smile.

Or, he doesn’t say anything.

-

He says something.

He says the right thing. Bucky takes it the right way, the way Steve meant it.

(“I heard what you said. Did you—” A pause. “Did you want me to hear?”

A surprised bark of laughter, a muttered, disbelieving  _asshole_. “You couldn’t have said this  _weeks_  ago?”

“Buck.”

Flatly: “What.”

“I’m glad I heard.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So.”

“Yeah.”)

-

“So,” Bucky says, again. A tentative smile is starting to tease at his lips, for the first time since before the train, because Steve is smiling, too.

And Steve is pulls him in. The  _yeah_  just a whisper against lips, this time.

-

They live.

_They live._


End file.
